Death Through the Ages: A Brief Overview - Ancient Times, The Classical Age, The Middle Ages, The Renaissance, The Eighteenth Century
Strange, is it not? That of the myriads who Before us passed the door of Darkness through, Not one returns to tell us of the road, Which to discover we must travel too.
Omar Khayyám
Death is the inevitable conclusion of life, a universal destiny that all living creatures share. Although all societies throughout history have realized that death is the certain fate of human beings, different cultures have responded to it in different ways. Through the ages, attitudes toward death and dying have changed and continue to change, shaped by religious, intellectual, and philosophical beliefs and conceptions. In modern times, advances in medical science and technology continue to influence ideas about death and dying.
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Archaeologists have found that as early as the Paleolithic period (about 2.5 to 3 million years ago), humans held metaphysical beliefs about death and dying. Tools and ornaments excavated at burial sites suggest that our earliest ancestors believed that some element of a person survived the dying experience. Ancient Hebrews (circa 1020–586 BCE), while acknowledging the existence of the soul…
Mythological beliefs among the ancient Greeks persisted into the classical age. The Greeks believed that after death the psyche—a person's vital essence—lived on in the underworld. The Greek writer Homer (circa 800–700 BCE) greatly influenced classical Greek attitudes about death through his epic poems the Iliad and the Odyssey. Greek mythology was freely interpreted by…
During the European Middle Ages (circa 500–1485), death—with its accompanying agonies—was accepted as a destiny everyone shared, but it was still feared. As a defense against this phenomenon that could not be explained, medieval people confronted death together, as a community. Because medical practices in this era were crude and imprecise, the ill and dying person often endur…
From the fourteenth through the sixteenth centuries, Europe experienced new directions in economics, the arts, and social, scientific, and political thought. Nonetheless, obsession with death did not diminish with this "rebirth" of Western culture. A new self-awareness and emphasis on humans as the center of the universe further fueled the fear of dying. By the sixteenth century many…
The fear of apparent death that took root in the seventeenth century resurfaced with great intensity during the eighteenth century. Coffins were built with contraptions to enable any prematurely buried person to survive and communicate from the grave. (See Figure 1.1.) For the first time the Christian Church was blamed for hastily burying its "living dead," particularly because it ha…
In the nineteenth century premature and lingering deaths remained commonplace. Death typically took place in the home following a lengthy deathbed watch. Family members prepared the corpse for viewing in the home, not in a funeral parlor. However, this practice changed during the late nineteenth century, when professional undertakers took over the job of preparing and burying the dead. They provid…
Modern medicine has played a vital role in the way people die and, consequently, the manner in which the dying process of a loved one affects relatives and friends. With advancements in medical technology, the dying process has become depersonalized, as it has moved away from the familiar surroundings of home and family to the sterile world of hospitals and strangers. Certainly, the institutionali…
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